Welcome to the sixth issue of the OpenAFS newsletter. This newsletter
summarizes what is happening in the OpenAFS community.

As always, volunteers, patches, bug reports, or any other type of help is
greatly appreciated.

Feedback on this newsletter is welcome. The goal is to summarize the
various development efforts and news of OpenAFS for the community. Please
let Jason Edgecombe <jason@rampaginggeek.com> know what you would like to
see out of this newsletter. Any news about AFS-related projects is welcome
and may be submitted to Jason for inclusion in the next newsletter.

There were three OpenAFS 1.5.x releases since the last newsletter. OpenAFS
1.5.65 was released on October 6, 2009. Highlights of this release include
several important bugfixes. All of the existing compile-time warnings have
been silenced, but they may be re-enabled with a ./configure option. This
was done to help prevent new warnings from creeping into the code. The
configure option can be used for those developers trying to clean up the
older warnings.

There was some discussion of allowing one or two hyphens to specify
command-line options. Michael Meffie supplied a patch to allow this and it
was approved. This feature will be included in a future release.

The OpenAFS web site is now using git for source control, and the older
CVS repository for the web site has been disabled.

There is some discussion about getting rid of the AFS lock icon in the
Windows system tray for future versions of AFS. A few people value the
clear indication that the lock icon gives for being logged in. Please join
in the discussion on the openafs-info mailing list.

The attendance of the event remained stable at about 50 people from 6
countries, including two colleagues from Pilsen, Czech Republic. There was
an introductory day, a day dealing with advanced topics, and a final
half-day dedicated mainly to site reports. Social activities consisted of
a sponsored bus tour through Rome (Sun Microsystems), a sponsored visit to
St Paul's Basilica (DIA Roma Tre), the second largest cathedral after
St. Peter's, and two dinners in typical Roman restaurants, where the
attendants proudly consumed more wine than water.

Thanks to INFN, this year Jeffrey Altman and Derrick Brashear were again
the invited guests, and Hartmut Reuter provided a detailed tutorial on the
combination of AFS with object storage. The slides of all talks are
available on the website, and the event was transmitted in real-time
streaming, provided by ENEA. Recordings can be freely accessed over the
web.

This workshop was a joint effort of the Department of Informatics and
Automation from Roma Tre University, and three research institutions:
CASPUR, ENEA, INFN. Two industrial sponsors contributed: E4 company and
Sun Microsystems.

The next year's conference will be hosted either in Pilsen, Czech
Republic, or Hamburg, Germany.

There is some progress in afs3-standardization. There are new protocol
descriptions for rxgk, rxk5, and Rx/OSD that were published in advance of
the hackathon, I just submitted a proposal for SRV records for AFS, and I
think there was an extended callback draft published as well.

A fix for 124484 (volumes not salvaged on first access from volserver) is
nearing completion, and should see public review soon. 124484 may be the
last critical DAFS bug; we are currently trying to reproduce earlier-seen
problems with the newest patches to see if they still exist.

We are also working on improved developer documentation for DAFS, as it
has been noted that a lack of a broad overview for the changes DAFS brings
(specifically in the volume package) has made contributions and review
prohibitively difficult for newcomers to DAFS code.

The MacOSX Preference Pane has been updated to use the launchd start
mode. StartupItems has been replaced by the launchd technology. The
behavior of the OpenAFS service at startup can be managed from the
Preference Pane. Both the launchd daemon and the preference pane use the
/Library/OpenAFS/Tools/root.client/usr/vice/etc/afs.rc file to start or
stop OpenAFS.

XCB was discussed at Edinburgh, and at the request of the group, a new I-D
draft was published, removing mention of asynchronous delivery. That
feature will be revisited in future. The XCB draft is under last call,
and interested parties are requested to review the draft and send comments
or indication of "support" or "not support" to the afs3-standardization
list.

The server preferences project has implemented code for the Windows platform
to rank servers based on packet round-trip time which is currently available
in gerrit. Using throughput as well will have updated code in gerrit soon
(although this is still a work in progress).

Upon getting code that seems reasonable for the Windows platform, the Unix
port should be a matter of re-implementing the code, but not changing too
much. I hope to have the unix port completed within a month, time-allowing.

--Jake

Even though the Google Summer of code has ended, Jake will continue
working on the project until completion. He is still working within the
original specifications of the project.